Dobrica Matković
Serbian politician

Dobrica Matković (Serbian Cyrillic: Добрица Матковић; 29 November 1887 – 9 October 1973) was a Serbian veteran of the World War I and a politician. Appointed as head of the Department for State Protection in 1929, he served as governor of the Danube Banovina between 1933 and 1935, and governor of the Morava Banovina between 1935 and 1936.
Born in Gornji Milanovac, Kingdom of Serbia, Matković served in the Serbian army during World War I. He retreated through Albania with the army. Matković became the veliki župan (head) of Bregalnica County in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He ordered and oversaw the massacre of 28-29 male inhabitants by Yugoslav regular troops in the village of Garvan on 3 March 1923. Historian Yves Tomic estimated the number of casualties as 53. The massacre was done in retaliation to an attack by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization against the Serbian colony of Kadrifakovo (resulting in 23-26 casualties and 15 wounded people) or the killing of 2 Yugoslav soldiers in Garvan.
He died long after the end of the wars and was buried in Savinac.
“Dobrica Matković” enters the record as serbian politician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dobrica, Matković and Serbian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5286729. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1887, 1973, 1929 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dobrica Matković” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.